
Bzip is not research work, in the sense that it doesn't present any
new ideas.  Rather, it's an engineering exercise based on existing
ideas.

Three documents describe essentially all the ideas behind bzip:
 
   Michael Burrows and D. J. Wheeler:
     "A block-sorting lossless data compression algorithm"
      10th May 1994. 
      Digital SRC Research Report 124.
      ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/SRC-124.ps.gz

   Peter Fenwick:
      Block Sorting Text Compression
      Proceedings of the 19th Australasian Computer Science Conference,
        Melbourne, Australia.  Jan 31 - Feb 2, 1996.
      ftp://ftp.cs.auckland.ac.nz/pub/peter-f/ACSC96paper.ps
      
   Alistair Moffat, Radford Neal and Ian Witten:
     "Arithmetic Coding Revisited"
        originally presented at the 1995 IEEE Data Compression
       Conference, Snowbird, Utah, USA in March 1995.

     The paper has evolved somewhat since then.  This implementation
     pertains to the June 1996 version of the paper.

All three are well written, and make fascinating reading.  If you want
to modify bzip in any non-trivial way, I strongly suggest you obtain,
read and understand these papers.

I am much indebted to the various authors for their help, support and
advice.

